Good point Jack.

What has happened here is that in the late ninety’s some filters were cracked and their vocabulary was found “wanting” in the sense that there was some aggrandized selective blocking. Cybersitter blocking Peacefire is an example (one of many examples). This emerging information regarding what was contained in some filters secret lists fueled a heat up in the Intellectual Freedom issue (over blocking) and a general distrust from the anti-filtering atavists as well as the “outrageous assumption “ that all filters were so “agendized”.

Filters were renamed “censoreware” by their critics. They were then personified as something “attacking society” rather than something “defending society” which was the spirit of their original conception.

As filters evolved to eliminate over blocking primarily by adding a “click through” feature
and transparency the “intellectual freedom” argument became history. To my knowledge there is not one anti-filtering person who acknowledges this evolution. They are content to let the “old conclusions” rest. In their silence they allow the “meme” to be “dittoed” by the unthinking.

Hence, the mantra “filters don’t work”.

1) wholesale content restriction (such as that advocated by family values groups arguing that no depiction of LGBT?/queer characters is suitable for children, with very narrow, prejudicial exceptions); and

2) parental control at circulation (something along the lines of, ‘my child is not allowed to check out books by these authors or on these subjects’)

The second may not be very likely across a broad population, but I don’t think it’s improbable in some areas.

I continue to find it so curious how librarians, whose workplace has been completely revolutionized by technologies they had no part in creating, should suddenly set themselves up as arbiters over whether a given technology “works,” i.e., now or ever.

Also, Karen, the question of whether people need or want filters has no bearing on whether or not they “work.” As a matter of fact, they work quite well, as the Supreme Court has attested.

If filters worked to the specifications of CIPA, effectively and without substantial overblocking, and libraries would go no further in stricting access, then I think we would be on more solid ground to discuss age-appropriate access.

But I think there are plenty of people who won’t want to stop there … the same people who don’t want their children reading “Daddy’s Roommate,” “The Drowning of Stephen Jones,” or any of the Harry Potter series won’t want their children looking at Wiccan websites and the PFLAG or GSLEN site. And they’re going to say, “This is harmful to my child, too. Why don’t you block this at the library?” And if the library does, I think that is acting ‘in loco parentis’ and the child is harmed. Minors don’t have the same range of First Amendment rights, but I do believe they have the right to information that may be controversial in their parents’ eyes.

If the library doesn’t restrict/filter access beyond the standards of what’s generally considered ‘harmful to minors,’ that’s fine, although we’re left with less of a theoretical leg to stand on without an age-neutral policy. That may be fine in the short term, but in the long term, it will increase the pressure on libraries to restrict the access of children to otherwise protected material, print or online. And if libraries succumb, I think that is acting in loco parentis. If a parent tells a child, “Don’t bring home any Harry Potter, I don’t want you read that,” that’s not my business. If a parent comes to the library and tells me, “Make sure my child doesn’t check out or access online any material about being gay,” and I do it, I think I am acting in place of the parent, even if I’m enacting standards of use that don’t apply to all users (or all minors).

I totally agree with you that libraries should hold on to the commitment of not being ‘in loco parentis,’ but I see moving away from the age-neutral policy as undermining that commitment and not strengthening it.

It seems like we have very different interpretations of ‘in loco parentis’ … it’s been a long time since I took any pre-law courses, so if I’m misrepresenting the common interpretation, please forgive me, it’s not intentional.

Moving towards the former, if a library chooses a filter that only blocks sexually explicit content, and the library’s limits are only for children by the children’s parents–why is this an issue for us? The argument can be made that most commercial filters block more than just sex, even in their sex categories. But if it’s an open-source filter, so the library is aware of what it is blocking, and the decision is left to the parent for the child, at that point, who are we harming?

Now, if a library chooses to block other content, or hands the decision off to a third party, or imposes this rule on adults–then we are discussing something different. But in the example above, who is harmed?